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The Cuban Missile Crisis: Thirteen Days on the Nuclear Brink
In October 1962, the Cold War came within a hair's breadth of becoming a nuclear one. For thirteen days that month, the United States and the Soviet Union confronted each other over the discovery that the Soviets had secretly installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, ninety miles from the American coast, capable of striking much of the United States within minutes. American reconnaissance had caught the deployment while the missile sites were still being built; President John F. Kennedy imposed a naval blockade of the island and demanded the missiles' removal; and for the better part of two weeks the world held its breath as the two superpowers, each armed with the power to destroy the other and much of humanity, edged toward the abyss. It was, and remains, the closest the world has ever come to full-scale nuclear war — closer, it later emerged, than even the participants understood at the time, with more than one moment in which a single decision, or a single frightened officer, might have triggered catastrophe. That it ended not in annihilation but in a negotiated settlement was the product of nerve, restraint, back-channel diplomacy, a secret deal, and no small amount of luck. This is the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis — the secret deployment, the discovery, the standoff, the near-catastrophes, and the fragile bargain that saved the world.
The Bay of Pigs
On the night of Sunday, April 16, 1961, approximately 1,400 Cuban exiles trained by the United States Central Intelligence Agency embarked from a staging port at Puerto Cabezas on Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast aboard chartered freighters of the García Line. They were Brigade 2506 — the operational unit codename derived from the serial number of the brigade's first combat fatality during the Guatemalan training phase. Their objective: an amphibious landing on the southern coast of Cuba at Bahía de Cochinos — the Bay of Pigs — followed by the establishment of a beachhead from which a provisional Cuban government-in-exile would be declared, internal opposition to Fidel Castro's two-and-a-half-year-old revolutionary government would be encouraged, and conventional U.S. military intervention could, if events warranted, be requested under cover of a civil war already in progress. The plan had been developed under the Eisenhower administration from March 1960; the operational variant executed in April 1961 had been authorized by President John F. Kennedy, in office for 87 days, on April 4 and again on April 16. The operation was, in its own operational terms, a comprehensive failure: the air strikes on Cuban airfields scheduled for the morning of April 15 destroyed only a fraction of Castro's air force; the landings on April 17 met immediate, sustained, and well-organized resistance; the second wave of U.S. air support was cancelled by Kennedy on April 16-17; the brigade was overrun at the beach within 72 hours. Brigade casualties: 114 killed, 1,189 captured. The captured personnel were held in Cuba until December 1962 when they were exchanged for approximately $53 million in U.S.-supplied food and medicine. Within weeks of the operation, Kennedy had requested the resignations of CIA Director Allen Dulles, CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell. Within eighteen months, the Soviet decision to install medium-range nuclear missiles on Cuban territory — a decision Nikita Khrushchev later attributed in part to the demonstration of U.S. willingness to attempt military overthrow — had brought the United States and the Soviet Union to within hours of nuclear exchange. The Bay of Pigs is the foundational documented operational failure of the U.S. intelligence community and the immediate institutional precursor to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Operation Northwoods
In March 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff put a document on Robert McNamara's desk. It proposed a series of false-flag attacks against the United States — sunk ships, civilian terror campaigns in Miami and Washington, a faked civilian airliner shoot-down — to manufacture public support for invading Cuba. Every member of the Joint Chiefs signed it. Kennedy rejected it within days. The document stayed buried for thirty-five years.
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